Salvador
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1994
Copyright © 1983 by Joan Didion
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1983.
Portions of this book were published in
The New York Review of Books
in 1982.
The author wishes to thank the following for their permission to reprint lines from:
The song “American Pie,” written by Don McLean, published by Mayday Music and Benny Bird Company, © 1971. Used by permission. All rights reserved
.
The specified abridged excerpt from pp. 63-64 in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel García Márquez. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. Copyright © 1975 by Gabriel García Márquez. English translation copyright © 1976 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher
.
The excerpt from “Heart of Darkness” from
Youth
by Joseph Conrad. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc
.
The lines from the poem by Roque Dalton García from the book
El Salvador:
The Face of the Revolution
by Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk
.
Copyright © 1982, South End Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Didion, Joan
Salvador / Joan Didion.
p. cm
Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78736-1
1. El Salvador—Politics and government—1979– 2. Civil rights—El Salvador. 3. Terrorism—El Salvador. 4. Human rights—El Salvador. 5. Didion, Joan—Journeys—El Salvador. I. Title.
F1488.3.D53 1994
972.8405’2—dc20 93-42217
Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne
v3.1
I am indebted for general background particularly to Thomas P. Anderson’s
Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932
(University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1971) and
The War of the Dispossessed: Honduras and El Salvador, 1969
(University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1981); to David Browning’s
El Salvador: Landscape and Society
(Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1971); and to the officers and staff of the United States embassy in San Salvador. I am indebted most of all to my husband, John Gregory Dunne, who was with me in El Salvador and whose notes on, memories about, and interpretations of events there enlarged and informed my own perception of the place.
This book is for
Robert Silvers
and for
Christopher Dickey
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
“All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence.… ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, although difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ ”
—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
T
HE
three-year-old El Salvador International Airport is glassy and white and splendidly isolated, conceived during the waning of the Molina “National Transformation” as convenient less to the capital (San Salvador is forty miles away, until recently a drive of several hours) than to a central hallucination of the Molina and Romero regimes, the projected beach resorts, the Hyatt, the Pacific Paradise, tennis, golf, water-skiing, condos,
Costa del Sol;
the visionary invention of a tourist industry in yet another republic where the leading natural cause of death is gastrointestinal infection. In the general absence of tourists these hotels have since been abandoned, ghost resorts on the empty Pacific beaches, and to land at this airport built to service them is to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.
The only logic is that of acquiescence. Immigration is negotiated in a thicket of automatic weapons, but by whose authority the weapons are brandished (Army or National Guard or National Police or Customs Police or Treasury Police or one of a continuing proliferation of other shadowy and overlapping forces) is a blurred point. Eye contact is avoided. Documents are scrutinized upside down. Once clear of the airport, on the new highway that slices through green hills rendered phosphorescent by the cloud cover of the tropical rainy season, one sees mainly underfed cattle and mongrel dogs and armored vehicles, vans and trucks and Cherokee Chiefs fitted with reinforced steel and bulletproof Plexiglas an inch thick. Such vehicles are a fixed feature of local life, and are popularly associated with disappearance and death. There was the Cherokee Chief seen following the Dutch television crew killed in Chalatenango province in March of 1982. There was the red Toyota three-quarter-ton pickup sighted near the van driven by the four American Catholic workers on the night they were killed in 1980. There were, in the late spring and summer of 1982, the three Toyota panel trucks, one yellow, one blue, and one green, none bearing plates, reported present at each of the mass detentions (a “detention” is another fixed feature of local life, and often precedes a “disappearance”) in the Amatepec district of San Salvador. These are the details—the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances—on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.
Terror is the given of the place. Black-and-white police cars cruise in pairs, each with the barrel of a rifle extruding from an open window. Roadblocks materialize at random, soldiers fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, safeties clicking on and off. Aim is taken as if to pass the time. Every morning
El Diario de Hoy
and
La Prensa Gráfica
carry cautionary stories.
“Una madre y sus dos hijos fueron asesinados con arma cortante (corvo) por ocho sujetos desconocidos el lunes en la noche”:
A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight
desconocidos
, unknown men. The same morning’s paper: the unidentified body of a young man, strangled, found on the shoulder of a road. Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyed by bayonets, one faced carved to represent a cross.
It is largely from these reports in the newspapers that the United States embassy compiles its body counts, which are transmitted to Washington in a weekly dispatch referred to by embassy people as “the grim-gram.” These counts are presented in a kind of tortured code that fails to obscure what is taken for granted in El Salvador, that government forces do most of the killing. In a January 15 1982 memo to Washington, for example, the embassy issued a “guarded” breakdown on its count of 6,909 “reported” political murders between September 16 1980 and September 15 1981. Of these 6,909, according to the memo, 922 were “believed committed by security forces,” 952 “believed committed by leftist terrorists,” 136 “believed committed by rightist terrorists,” and 4,889 “committed by unknown assailants,” the famous
desconocidos
favored by those San Salvador newspapers still publishing. (The figures actually add up not to 6,909 but to 6,899, leaving ten in a kind of official limbo.) The memo continued:
“The uncertainty involved here can be seen in the fact that responsibility cannot be fixed in the majority of cases. We note, however, that it is generally believed in El Salvador that a large number of the unexplained killings are carried out by the security forces, officially or unofficially. The Embassy is aware of dramatic claims that have been made by one interest group or another in which the security forces figure as the primary agents of murder here. El Salvador’s tangled web of attack and vengeance, traditional criminal violence and political mayhem make this an impossible charge to sustain. In saying this, however, we make no attempt to lighten the responsibility for the deaths of many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, which can be attributed to the security forces.…”
The body count kept by what is generally referred to in San Salvador as “the Human Rights Commission” is higher than the embassy’s, and documented periodically by a photographer who goes out looking for bodies. These bodies he photographs are often broken into unnatural positions, and the faces to which the bodies are attached (when they are attached) are equally unnatural, sometimes unrecognizable as human faces, obliterated by acid or beaten to a mash of misplaced ears and teeth or slashed ear to ear and invaded by insects.
“Encontrado en Antiguo Cuscatlán el día 25 de Marzo 1982: camison de dormir celeste,”
the typed caption reads on one photograph: found in Antiguo Cuscatlán March 25 1982 wearing a sky-blue nightshirt. The captions are laconic. Found in Soyapango May 21 1982. Found in Mejicanos June 11 1982. Found at El Playón May 30 1982, white shirt, purple pants, black shoes.
The photograph accompanying that last caption shows a body with no eyes, because the vultures got to it before the photographer did. There is a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question. One learns that hair deteriorates less rapidly than flesh, and that a skull surrounded by a perfect corona of hair is a not uncommon sight in the body dumps.